Digital documents continue to proliferate, and users continue to demand the ability to display these documents on a variety of different devices. Additionally, these users are demanding the ability to perform a variety of functions on these digital documents.
In many instances, when digital documents are displayed on devices or printed from devices, display or printing applications may call device drivers to display or print the documents. When the display or printing applications call these device drivers, the applications may pass only glyph representations of text to the device drivers, or may pass indices to such glyph representations.
Glyphs or glyph indices relate to visible aspects of characters, for example, the shapes or outlines of the character. However, do not convey meaning associated with the characters. Thus, the glyphs are not interactive, and do not enable the device drivers to perform operations in which the meaning of the characters, as distinguished from the mere appearance of the characters, is relevant.